No matter whether you’re a social media novice, aficionado, or expert, there is bound to be something in this book you can glean from. It’s a great resource for teachers and students, and it covers all of the basis from blogging to the importance of a social media plan.
If you’ve read this book, let me know your thoughts. I’d love to glean from you, and learn what has and has not worked. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can buy it below.
Akismet is good at combating most comment spam, but it doesn’t catch everything. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if someone took the time to read my blog and comment, or if they just posted a generic comment.
If you comment, “nice blog,” or even post a longer comment that does not mention me or anything about my blog, I won’t publish your comment. I’ll assume you wrote out a generic comment to a Word doc, such as, “Most of what I read online is trash and copy and paste, but you definitely add value. Bravo,” and you copied and pasted that to numerous blogs without reading those blogs.
To everyone who takes the time to read and comment on my blogs, I appreciate your comments. Though, unless you mention me, my blog, or something relevant to the topic I blogged about, I can’t decipher whether you read my blog and wrote out that comment or if you just copied and pasted generic comments to random blogs.
The purpose of blogging is to spur conversation. Posting random comments to random blogs without reading those blogs is like pretending to have a conversation with a person, while nodding, thinking about something else, saying ‘right’ every few moments, and leaving without any notion of what that person just said.
Perhaps, you’re thinking, ‘Who cares? A comment is a comment.’ I don’t think the laziness of SEO content writers or bloggers who cut corners should be rewarded. Let’s keep the conversation going by respecting one another enough to post comments that encourage conversation.
So, you’ve read my blogs about the social Web browser Flock this week, but you’re not ready to give up your Internet browser. No worries. Neither am I. Sometimes, I use Flock, and other times I don’t. It depends on my mood, and what I need to get done. If you want to give Flock a whirl, but you’re already set up with another Web browser, you can change your settings.
Click Flock in the tool bar, select preferences, select main, and type any site as your default site. If you’re like me and you’re an Internet pack rat (You collect and save so many websites that you can’t remember them all), go to favorites, select organize favorites, select import HTML, and import your favorites from Firefox, Safari, or an HTML file. If you want to export your favorites at a later time, select export HTML file. You can also import your favorites by selecting File, clicking Import, and going through the steps. If you go this second route you cannot import an HTML file.
Remember, if you blog, you can integrate your blog with Flock. Open your Flock browser, click the key icon under the star, scroll down in the left sidebar to blogging, and select the blog service you us. If you have a self-hosted blog, select Self-Hosted Blog and type your blog URL. You can also use their photo and video uploader and many other features, so go ahead and try Flock today.
I’ll see you tomorrow. I may discontinue my weekly “This week in social media,” but I’ll make sure to have something good for you.
Today, let’s talk about how Flock integrates search into the social Web experience. In the top right corner of the My World tab, you will notice a search bar. Next to the magnifying glass, you’ll notice the icon of the search engine it’s defaulted to and an arrow key. You can use that arrow key to change the search engine you use to conduct your searches.
Of course, Google and Yahoo! are among those search engines, but maybe you want to search for the best deals on a new e-reader. You can make eBay or Amazon your default search engine. You can also set your default search engine to Wikipedia, Digg, and Twitter among others.
Continuing on in the My World tab, there are preset columns. One of those columns is marked Twitter Search. You can use that to create a stream for whichever keywords you want to search for on Twitter. If you click on “Save Search,” that stream will become it’s own stream allowing you to watch multiple Twitter streams. And if you want to see which terms are trending on Twitter, there’s a button that will tell you exactly that.
For those who want to search through various media, they can use the search bar in the Media Bar. To open that click on the icon of the camera near the upper left corner of the browser. A black bar will appear above the Web page you are on. On the top left, you will see media streams that will allow you to choose which site you want to use to search for media. You can also use the search bar on the right side of this screen for a similar function.
There’s more on search, so check out this cool vid.
So, now that you’ve downloaded Flock, you need to know how to use it. Well, when you first open Flock, two tabs will appear: Flock – Getting started and My World. The getting started tab lists the icons of nine social media services you can integrate your social web browser with. As I mentioned yesterday, there are more, but these are the most popular ones (Notice Myspace is on there). The My World tab shows four columns with your most recent visited sites, friends activity, Twitter activity with a search bar, favorite feeds, and favorite media. If you want to change the positioning, you can do so just like you would change the position of a column in a Twitter desktop client. If you’re not sure what that means, see my blog on The Battle of the Twitter Desktop Clients. These are just the basics of using Flock.
Now, let’s start setting up Flock. Once you choose which services out of the ‘stay connected’ services in the Getting started tab you want to integrate into your social Web browsing experience, you’ll notice a live stream of Tweets and/or updates from people you follow appears in the right column. Without leaving this Web browser, you can respond and/or retweet them. There are only three options of sites to connect with in your getting started tab, but you can connect with others by clicking on the key icon above the streams. After you get them all set up, a green dot will appear to signify which ones are active. To be able to see that side bar again just click on the icon of the person almost all of the way to the left. Below that, you can select which of the sites you want to see your friends’ streams from, or you can select all.
There’s more on Flock. For now, check out these vids.
Maybe you want to get into this whole social media thing, but you’re not sure where to start. Or maybe you’re way in over your head with all this conversational Web mumbo jumbo, and you don’t know how to make any sense of it. Well, today I’m going to tell you about a tool that is going to make your life much easier. It’s a social web browser called Flock.
I don’t use all the services Flock connects to, but I use enough to make it useful. Now, before we get started, go ahead and download Flock. Depending on what operating system you’re using, the steps to download it may differ. It works on Word, Mac OS X, and Linux; and it’s available in several different languages.
Before I tell you how to use Flock, let me tell you what it connects with. For those who want to stay connected with their friends, Flock integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, and Myspace (yes, Myspace is still one of the leading social networking sites in the U.S.). If you just want to find great photos and videos and post them, Flock integrates with YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, TinyPic, and Truveo. For those who just want to keep up with their e-mail, Flock integrates with Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL. And if you want to make your blogging easier, Flock integrates with Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress, and Xanga. If you have a self-hosted blog, you can integrate that with Flock.
And you’re not limited, because this social web browser is an Internet browser. You can use it just like you would any other browser, but it makes socializing on the conversational web seamless with cruising through the World Wide Web.
I’ll tell you more about Flock, tomorrow. For now, check out this cool vid.
All week I’ve been thinking about what I could blog about on Fridays that would set this blog apart, and I have nothing. I came across a hilarious Stephen Colbert video on Social Media Marketing, but I can’t find the code to embed it. So, I looked through Google to see if I could find another funny video on social media marketing or SEO content, but I couldn’t find anything.
On Fridays I’m just going to post blogs about the week in social media and/or SEO content. Whether it be articles, videos, or other, every Friday I will publish a blog about whatever’s happened that week in social media or SEO content.
For this week, here is a video on how to suggest a Facebook fanpage to your friends. I know it seems like such a simple thing, but Facebook keeps changing the look and feel of their site.
Also, you’ll notice I added a ShareThis button to the bottom all my blogs. Thank you to those who took the time copy my URL and Tweet it yesterday. Now, you just need to click the ShareThis button, choose which social networking platform you want to share my blog on, type a message, and let the Internet do the rest.
If you have a WordPress site, you can add a ShareThis button. Feel free to comment and please come back next week for more on social media marketing and SEO content. I appreciate all of you.
Throughout the last several years, programmers have developed WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Web design platforms, allowing everyone to take their piece of the Web. Among the most popular of those are WordPress, MovableType, and Wix. I believe that of all of those sites that allow everyone their piece of the Web, one will revolutionize the way in which we interact with each other through social networking.
For the past couple of years, ever since the iPhone went on the market, everyone has wanted the latest app. In fact, the saying goes, “There’s an app for that.” A while back, Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) referred to Twitter as being part of a social networking environemt. If sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others are part of a social networking environment, then people who use those sites and connect them to their websites responsibly are social media environmentalists.
During the evolution of websites that allow people to develop their own websites, third party developers have added apps and widgets that allow people to integrate their websites with various social networking accounts. Those third party apps must be supported by that site; though, people want more security in knowing that the apps and widgets they put on their sites won’t harm their sites or their computers.
Finally, one WYSIWYG platform (Squarespace) has developed their own apps, giving everyone the ability to design their own website and the confidence in knowing where their apps came from. And because of this innovative WYSIWYG platform, I believe 10 years from now, we will look back on the Internet in the 2nd decade of the 21st century as the decade of Social Media Environmentalism.
In the future, I hope to see Squarespace develop apps and widgets for various other social media sites. And I hope sites such as WordPress, Movabletype, Wix, and others will follow.
For now, we the people of the World Wide Web want apps for that and everything else, and we don’t want to have to worry about our security. Squarespace just started a new trend—Social Media Environmentalism—and those who build their sites using Squarespace can pride themselves on being some of the very first Social Media Environmentalists.
Let’s get a conversation going. Let me know your thoughts.
